Brady Corbet’s three-and-a-half hour film is being heralded as a massive cinematic achievement in the current film landscape. It follows a Hungarian architect named Lazlo Toth, played by Adrien Brody, as he comes to America after the Holocaust.
With a 15-minute intermission (making the runtime three hours and 45 minutes), a sweeping brassy score and incredible Vistavision 70-millimeter cinematography, it has the exact makeup of a classic. It invokes George Stevens’s “Giant” and Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America” in the way the camera swings around its characters and horizons. However, “The Brutalist” unfortunately does not reach all of the same heights that engrained these films in the cinematic cannon.
Before becoming a director, Corbet was an actor; he was directed by great American and European directors like Greg Arraki, Lars Von Trier and Michael Haneke. As he moved into the directing chair, he began making small independent films. Compared to the size of most lower-budget studio films, Corbet and his wife, Mona Fastvold, have been able to make multiple films on their own accord with budgets a fraction of the size. “The Brutalist” is no different.
Being made with a budget of $10 million, “The Brutalist” feels much larger than this. Shooting on film is expensive. Every second is money being spent, and the processes required to handle and develop the footage are very particular and require a lot of work. On top of that, Corbet was shooting on a VistaVision, a film format that has not been shot in America since the 1960s — it’s incredibly ambitious what he was able to pull off. The period details of 1940s through 1960s make America feel lived-in and real, and the production design is incredible. Corbet claims that a lot of corners were cut in order to pull off this magic trick, but it’s hard to tell that while watching the film.
The first 100 minutes before the intermission go by at breakneck speed. Lazlo Toth arrives in America, he works for his cousin and gets the opportunity to create a building for a rich man. The realism of the performances, the beauty in the images and incredible score work together in harmony all piece together to create a truly groundbreaking piece of art. But as the film resumes for its second half, the story diverges.
In part, this directional change is by Corbet and Fastvold’s own design. If the first half of the film is validating the American dream, the second half is the deconstruction of that dream. However, it does not work in the way they intended.
The rich man that Lazlo Toth begins working for in the first half of the film is Harrison Van Buren, a nuanced man. He’s clearly anti-Semitic and rude, but also extremely passionate and motivated to support Lazlo. He wants Lazlo to reach the peak of his ambitions and backs up his ideas, even if he doesn’t understand them.
Though he’s played incredibly well by Guy Pearce, Van Buren’s character becomes much less nuanced and melodramatic in the second half of the film. Corbet described the film as a melodrama and more exaggerated performances occur in the second half. But with Brody, his wife, Erzsébet (played by Felicity Jones), and Alwyn still performing in a naturalistic manner, the film feels dissonant. And this is where it really starts to fall apart.
It wants to be a realistic account of immigrating to America while also being chalk-full of ideas. It wants to take down the American dream and indict capitalism, but at the same time it takes neutral stances on other political issues.
Its commentary on capitalism and the arts is not simplistic but was done with better gravitas and less pretension in another Adrien Brody film, “The French Dispatch.” To an extent, this film insists upon itself. The height of its ambitions and the ideas it posits are heady and only gestured toward. It, in reality, has much less interest in the immigrant experience than it cares to recognize.
The inspiration for this film came from Corbet’s own feeling that to be an artist making a piece of art that is provocative, and it getting panned before it has the chance to speak for itself. This is one of the current obsessions in American film: movies being metaphors for movie-making. What made “The Godfather” and “There Will be Blood” such classic films is that they say so much about humanity, greed, corruption and family. Films about the making of films, films about the struggle to make films and the love of film only really work if the artist is already “drinking the kool-aid.” The classics work as great pieces of drama because on the surface level, there is so much to pull from them but at the core they work as incredible entertainment.
However, that being said, It’s not the strongest film ever made; Corbet and Fastvold have a lot to work on before entering the realm of masters like Francis Ford Coppola or Paul Thomas Anderson. Nevertheless, it’s still worth the watch. There should be many “Brutalists’” being discussed with nuanced conversations.
The majority of film discourse today focuses on a film’s creation and what went on behind the scenes rather than having discourse on the ideas being argued by these pieces of art. For every “Godfather,” there needs to be 10 more “Brutalists” and “Heaven’s Gates” in order for cinema to evolve. In order for the medium to ever move forward, it needs to position itself back to the art of film.
Verdict: This film is not entirely a disaster, but, if “The Brutalist” is not interpreted metaphorically, it fails to work at all.